Top stories concerning British Isles ancestral research from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit British GENES if you do so. Should you wish to get in touch, contact me at christopherpaton @ tiscali.co.uk. Happy hunting!

Pages

Monday, 13 May 2013

Irish Statistics (1926 Census) Bill 2013 now online

The Irish government has placed the draft bill online that could see the publication of the 1926 census for Saorstát Éireann, the predecessor state to the current Republic of Ireland. The bill is described as follows:

Bill entitled an Act to amend the Statistics Act 1993, in relation to the first census of population of Ireland taken since the establishment of the State; to afford that census a special heritage status and to have such released to the public for genealogical, historical and other research

5 comments:

Unfortunately, this is only a Private Member's Bill and is not backed by the government. It might stimulate debate, but it will never be passed into legeslation. Readers need to write to the Department of the Taoiseach to convince the Taoiseach (Ireland's prime minister) to honour his government's pledge (given in the Programme for Government) to open the 1926 census. The Irish eritage Minister (Jimmy Deenihan TD) is right behind this plan, but the Central Statistics Office won't budge. Mr Deenihan woukd like to have the census returns online by 2016! You can email the Taoiseach (Mr Enda Kenny TD) at taoiseach@taoiseach.gov.ie

No idea Joan, but the Genealogical Society of Ireland has a record for getting private member's bills published, none of which have ever progressed to legislation. They did get one of their bills debated in parliament once, but that was as far as it ever got. This is their second private member's bill about the 1926 census. But unfortunately, it won't pass into law until the Central Statistics Office has been convinced of its merit. This is unlikely to happen soon and the only real recourse open to genealogists is to lobby the Taoiseach.

The Council of Irish Genealogical Organisations (www.cigo.ie)has put in a lot of work on this issue too. Their website notes that it was they who suggested the idea of redacting data relating to people born more than 100 years ago. The Minister for Heritage liked this idea and was willing to run with it and to progress the project so that the census data could go online in 2016. No government legislation has yet been publshed, but the Heritage Minister is moving on the issues of conservation and digitisation of the census records.